There have been significant advances in creating visually immersive virtual environments in recent years. These advances have resulted in the widespread uptake of massively multi-player role-playing games, in which participants can enter a common virtual environment (such as a battlefield) and are represented in the virtual environment by an avatar, which is typically in the form of an animated character.
The widespread uptake of visually immersive virtual environments is due, in part, to significant advances in both image processing technology enabling highly detailed and realistic graphics to be generated in the virtual environment and the development of three-dimensional sounds cards employing high speed processing units. A major drawback with these environments, however, is that current inter-player communication mechanisms are primitive—usually involving text chat or walkie-talkie voice communications. Embedding a more natural communications environment where voices appear to come from the avatars in the virtual world corresponding to the player is complex to implement and expensive to deliver. The audio generated by each player participating in the virtual environment must be sent to each and every other player that is within hearing range. For massively multi-player games, both the upstream and downstream bandwidth requirements for facilitating such an audio exchange may be particularly high.
Moreover, the CPU cost required to render all of the received audio streams is high, requiring particularly powerful processing units to be employed in order to meet the minimum hardware requirements for participating in the virtual environment.
Definitions
The following provides definitions for various terms used throughout this specification:                Audio Scene—audio information comprising combined sounds (for example, voices belonging to other avatars and other real-time sources of sound within the virtual environment) that are spatially placed and optionally attenuated according to a distance between a source and recipient of the sound. An audio scene may also comprise sound effects that represent the acoustic characteristics of the environment.        